More Than $100 Million in Attack Ads Fails to Move Voters

By John McCormick -
Jul 25, 2012

After spending more than $100
million airing mostly negative ads in the last three months,
President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney and
their allies haven’t been able to move the public-opinion needle
in the states most likely to determine the general election.

In seven battleground states the candidates are either
statistically tied or Obama holds a slight advantage, polls
show. The deadlock comes as the campaign moves into a more
critical phase that includes the presumptive Republican
nominee’s foreign trip and running-mate selection and the two
national conventions in late August and early September.

Obama, 50, ran more than 136,000 spots in his top seven
battleground states during the past 90 days, according to a
Bloomberg News analysis of data from New York-based Kantar
Media’s CMAG, a company that tracks advertising. Romney, 65, ran
almost 60,000 ads in those states during that period. Three
Republican groups backing his candidacy leveled the field some
by airing 55,136 commercials attacking the president, while a
pro-Obama group ran 11,377 ads.

Still, the blitz isn’t persuading voters in part because so
few of them -- about 5 percent in most surveys -- are undecided.
“These guys are not worrying about efficiency,” said Ken Goldstein, CMAG’s president. “It is a blunt club and it is
going to have very small effects on a very small group of
people. There are very few undecided voters and they are very
hard to reach, but one way to reach them is through local TV.”

Rising Unfavorability

The spending has had one effect: it’s worked to increase
the negative views of both candidates.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week,
more than 4 in 10 voters said they felt less favorably toward
the candidates after all that they had seen, read and heard
about them in recent weeks. The poll also showed disenchantment
with Obama and Romney growing since June, as 43 percent of
voters viewed the president unfavorably, compared with 40
percent for Romney.

With jobs and the economy at the top of the list of voters’
concerns, those issues also dominate the content of most
commercials. Of the 27 presidential spots aired by the
candidates and outside groups in the last month, 24 of them have
focused on economic issues, according to CMAG. In the most-aired
commercials paid for by the candidates, the two sides have
engaged in sharp exchanges over which candidate is responsible
for moving jobs overseas.

Obama’s campaign spent an estimated $49.6 million to run
ads in those seven states during the past 90 days, while
Romney’s has spent $19.6 million. Crossroads GPS, Americans for
Prosperity and Restore Our Future, three outside groups backing
Romney, spent $29 million in those seven battleground states
during the past 90 days. Priorities USA Action, founded by
former Obama aides, spent $4.6 million in those states during
that period, according to CMAG data.

In Ohio, Obama is devoting the most attention to the
Cleveland market, where he ran 7,546 spots from April 25 through
July 23, the CMAG data shows. Romney’s Ohio advertising was also
the most concentrated in Cleveland. He ran 3,365 spots there.

Obama Commercial

One of the most heavily aired commercials by the
president’s re-election committee has audio of Romney singing
“America the Beautiful,” as screen snapshots accuse him of
sending jobs to Mexico, China, and India and remind voters of
his Swiss bank account and investments in Bermuda and the Cayman
Islands. “Mitt Romney is not the solution. He’s the problem,”
the commercial concludes. Tampa, Florida-based PolitiFact.com
scored the outsourcing assertions as “half true” and the
overseas investment portion of the ad “true.”

Among Romney’s top ads is one that claims stimulus money
was doled out to “friends, donors, campaign supporters, special
interest groups,” and that it financed windmills from China and
electric cars from Finland -- an assertion PolitiFact ranked as
“mostly false”

Most voters already think there’s little left to learn
about the presidential candidates, according to a survey
released July 24 by the Pew Research Center. For Obama, 90
percent of registered voters say they already mostly know what
they need to know, while 69 percent say that of Romney.

Voter Curiosity

When it comes to Romney’s background and experience, 41
percent say they’d like to know more about his record as
Massachusetts governor, while 36 percent would like to learn
more about his tax returns and 35 percent want to know more
about his record at the Boston-based private-equity firm Bain
Capital LLC. Far fewer want to learn more about his wealth (21
percent), his family and upbringing (19 percent) and his Mormon
religious beliefs (16 percent).

Goldstein said the spending can affect attitudes about the
candidates and help boost turnout, even if it isn’t moving
opinions much when it comes to the candidate horserace.

“Obama is already really campaigning hard,” Judith Trent,
a University of Cincinnati professor who studies political
communications, said of Obama’s spending. “They’re a little
nervous with the polling data and that it doesn’t show the
incumbent very much ahead.”

Obama’s campaign took a different turn this week by adding
some positive advertising and introducing a spot that shows the
president speaking directly to the camera for 60 seconds as he
contrasts policy differences between himself and Romney.

Romney Ad

One of Romney’s recent ads presents Obama as unfriendly to
American business by using a truncated portion of a comment he
made earlier in the month: “if you’ve got a business, you
didn’t build that.” News media fact checkers have labeled the
ad as misleading and out of context.

Some of the harshest attacks have come from the super-
political action committees, which raise and spend unlimited
sums while not coordinating with the candidates. A Priorities
USA Action commercial asserts Romney bought companies and
“drowned them in debt” before driving them into bankruptcy and
firing workers. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave the ad
three Pinocchios, saying it’s “impossible to know” how many
employees lost jobs during Romney’s tenure at Bain.